Dramatic Arts

This course equips students with skills for analyzing performance as distinct from written text. It facilitates students' critical and productive engagement with London and the vast cultural resources and history it has to offer and explores some of the current issues in cultural politics and critical ways of approaching them. The course involves fieldwork at various sites around London and attendance at performances and events, and it requires critical response to seminar-based discussion.

The course introduces students to the main currents of modern European drama and theatre by providing an in-depth analysis of twelve most representative plays by Henrik Ibsen, A. P. Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Genet, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Students acquire knowledge of advanced methods of drama analysis and enhance their skills in drama and theatre analysis.

How and why are Shakespeare’s plays performed, filmed, read, and taught from China to Chile, from Singapore to South Africa? What makes Shakespeare a “global” force? Shakespeare's plays display the vast panoply of human desires and emotions: from passionate love to bewildering fear, from unswerving loyalty to basest envy, from the noblest instances of self-sacrifice to the desire to inflict unspeakable pain. His depictions of these emotions are often shocking in their vividness, yet always recognizable as fundamental facets of human experience. This course will look at Shakespeare’s afterlives in different parts of the world, and include hands-on workshops in which students try out different possible ways of interpreting “global” plays like Antony and Cleopatra.

The study of performance is central to our understanding of modern society. Introducing key issues, debates and possibilities, the course provides a broadly contextualized understanding of how local and global social and economic conditions inform specific performative practices and the performing arts. The curriculum unpacks and explores the significance of performing culture in terms of a distinctive set of key tensions or dualisms ­– including between the everyday and stage, restoration and novelty, authenticity and inauthenticity, the participatory versus the presentational, and dis-enchantment versus re-enchantment. Advancing enquiry in relation to spontaneity, improvisation, play, the embodied nature of performance and more besides, the course encourages and enables a reflexive understanding of what performing, performance, and performativity constitute in our own lives, and how we might learn to develop them in creative ways for the benefit of ourselves and our communities.